Philippe Parreno

Maria Lind

This exhibition catalog for the influential French artist Philippe Parreno spans a year-long retrospective to be held in five venues: the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (New York), Kunsthalle Zurich, Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and the Serpentine Gallery in London. Parreno’s wide-ranging, highly experimental work is rooted in Conceptual Art, and ranges across media including film, video, science fiction, art theory and drawing. The catalog focuses on Parreno’s recent film, June 8, 1968, which reinterprets Robert F. Kennedy’s funeral train procession, as well as No Ghost, Just a Shell, a collaboration between Parreno and Pierre Huyghe. Commentary on program of related events is included, as well as texts by Maria Lind, Tom Eccles, Simon Critchley, Jörn Schaffaff and others.

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JÜRGEN PARTENHEIMER

Seeds and Tracks and Folded Spirits: South African Diary

Jochen Kienbaum & Bronwyn Law-Viljoen (Eds.)

Part of the Kienbaum Artists’ Books series, this illustrated hardcover compiles drawings and diary entries from 2011 made during an inspiring sojourn in South Africa by the multi-faceted German artist Jürgen Partenheimer. His writing complements the subtle nuances, delicate lines and tones of his graphic work, oils, graphite on canvas and sculptures in bronze, wood or wire. The symbolic essence of Partenheimer’s work is the fragility that derives from the line, visible even in his great stele towering some seven meters above the ground. Now based near Cologne, Partenheimer has long been noted for his literary endeavors, such as his diary when he was guest artist at the famous residential complex designed by Oscar Niemeyer in São Paulo, or his drawings and notes from 2007, when he was invited to the Nietzsche House in Sils-Maria. Writings by Jürgen Partenheimer and Bronwyn Law-Viljoen.

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JÜRGEN PARTENHEIMER

Calliope

Anne-Claire Schumacher

At the invitation of the Nymphenburg porcelain factory in Munich, renowned German artist Jürgen Partenheimer (b. 1947) created three sculptural vessels that convey his minimalist, yet highly personal and poetic vocabulary. In drawings and documentary photographs, Calliope documents the history of the factory, the eponymous exhibition and Partheimer’s working process in which the hand-turned vessels undergo a quite unpredictable transformation during their shaping, firing and glazing. The exhibition at the Musée Ariana in Geneva and this publication are part of the Nymphenburg Porcelain Factory’s invitational in which artists are invited to create a new work based on an historical object from their archives. Partenheimer approaches his subject matter at the very boundary of its corporeality as it transitions between immateriality and materiality.

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PASADENA TO SANTA BARBARA:

A Selected History of Art in Southern California, 1951-1969

Decades before today’s major Los Angeles museums realized the potential of contemporary art, the pioneering institutions Pasadena Art Museum and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art under curator-directors Thomas Leavitt and Walter Hopps championed talented local and internationally recognized painters. Part of the Getty Research Institute’s Pacific Standard Time initiative, this crisp exhibition catalog reconstructs the partially forgotten history through photos and reproductions. Storied moments such as Kienholz’s first solo show (1961), Duchamp’s chess game with a naked Eve Babitz (1963) and Diebenkorn’s first major exhibition (1963) reenter the annals of 20th-century American art history.

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PASOLINI’S BODIES AND PLACES

Michele Mancini, Giuseppe Perrella & Benedikt Reichenbach (Eds.)

Around 1980 in Rome, a small cooperative around film critics Michele Mancini and Giuseppe Perrella produced a mysterious, elaborate and yet seemingly effortless 600-page book of b&w photographs, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Corpi e Luoghi (1981). In the multifaceted cultural and political environment of the era, the publication was acclaimed an indispensable tool for future Pasolini (1922-1975) research. Although long since forgotten and out of print, Corpi e Luoghi, to this day, it remains what one reviewer called “the most Pasolinian book to date”. With its relentless and yet playful classification of some 2,000 film stills arranged under the categories of “bodies” and “places”, Mancini and Perrella stage an ever-shifting archival space. Some of the pictures recurring under various subcategories. With a hidden reference to Walter Benjamin and a correspondingly revolutionary attitude, quotation here is understood as a form of “appropriation”, as a practical application of specific material.

In keeping with the great filmmaker’s credo, Pier Paolo Pasolini: Corpi e Luoghi is a colossal attempt to take this enormous amount of material, in book form, where it wants to go. The new quasi-facsimiled edition—Pasolini’s Bodies and Places—translated into English for the first time by noted American curator Ann Goldstein and edited by graphic designer and cultural historian Benedikt Reichenbach, explores the original publication. Its compilation of quoted film images is preceded by brief texts by Pasolini unpublished prior to Corpi e Luoghi and accompanied by Mancini and Perrella’s text discussing their approach.

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NATHALIE DU PASQUIER

Big Objects Not Always Silent

Luca Lo Pinto (Ed.)

French-born, Italy-based artist Nathalie Du Pasquier (b. 1957) was one of the founding members of Memphis, the groundbreaking Milanese design and architecture collective. During her time with Memphis, she designed patterns for textiles, carpets, objects and furniture, and later, patterns for American Apparel. Since 1987, her main passion has been painting and still life. In honor of the artist’s rich career, this very personal two-volume artist book accompanying a traveling retrospective by Kunsthalle Wien and the ICA, University of Pennsylvania, features over 30 years of Du Pasquier’s drawings and paintings, plus installation views. Influences range from Africa, Le Corbusier to de Chirico and Morandi. An interview with the artist by Luca Lo Pinto and essays by Andrew Ayers, Dafne Boggeri, Stephen Piccolo, Lodovico Pignatti Morano and Barbara Radice provide an informative and subjective view of her artistic practice.

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PASSINGS TO PRESENTS

Silence & Golden in the Work of Fillipo Minelli

Italian artist Fillipo Minelli has produced a body of land art based work that in his own words, “points out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies.” Travelling to remote and economically strained corners of the world—from Mali to Cambodia—Minelli tags favelas and hillsides with terms from contemporary social media: “Flickr” on a lean-to in Phnom Phen, “Facebook” on a landfill in Barnako. This ephemeral poetry, moving beyond its roots in street art, disseminates our social networks by simultaneously criticizing our misplaced fixation on virtual technology and affirming opportunities for real-life sharing and negotiating. In Minelli’s first artist book, texts are featured on neutralized white pages while their corresponding visual is hidden yet accessible inside Japanese folded pages. This conceptual format confronts the typical hyper-speed of image circulation in our networked society.

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MICHA PATINIOTT

Curiously Human

In 2010, the prestigious Stedelijk Museum Schiedam presented the first solo museum show for young Dutch painter Micha Patiniott along with this slim but wonderfully engaging exhibition catalog. Patiniott’s paintings, rooted in personal experience and imagination, capture reality with a twist. In his work, trivial situations soon get out of hand and lead to poetic, bizarre or amusing images. Patiniott is primarily a story-teller. His paintings are impulses to anecdotes or scenes from a narrative. Viewers can project their emotions on to them or use the ingredients for their own interpretations. Patiniott’s stories are unfinished. They do not confirm images, they create them. Patiniott’s career includes a year residency at the Fine Arts Work Ctr., Provincetown, Massachusetts, along with continued international exposure.

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RICHARD PATTERSON

Richard Patterson’s complex, multilayered paintings sit firmly within the grand tradition of European and American art, to which he has added his own. One of the Young British Artists to emerge in the late 1980s, and a participant in both the Freeze and Sensation exhibitions, the artist has continued to challenge and push the boundaries of painting today. His collage paintings are steeped in pop culture allusions ranging from films, magazines and music to advertising and consumerism, while simultaneously testing the links between painting, iconography and the narrative. At long last a comprehensive survey on Patterson’s rich career. Texts by Toby Kamps and Jeremy Strick and an artist interview by Martin Herbert.

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NOVA PAUL

Form Next to Form Next to Form

Gwynneth Porter (Ed.)

This trip into Maori culture and landscape is a collaboration between New Zealand artist Noval Paul and the celebrated graphic design collective Åbäke. Paul’s 16mm film, This  is  not  Dying, was shot using a three-color separation process, later composed to form a single image with a creeping aura of turquoise, pink, lilac and apricot. Mesmerizing multi-colored stills from the film are reproduced along with a poetic essay from Paul and editor Gwynneth Porter, “The Virtue of Trees,” that, like a tree, grew from conversations spanning ideas of sovereignty, resistance, film analysis, genealogy and care of self and the world around us. Evocatively accompanied by a 7” LP with a recording of ‘Whakarongo Mai,’ played by Ben Tawhiti on slide and steel guitar (released by 1:12 Records, Auckland).

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